WORLD WAR Z (2013)

Although based on Max Brooks’ apocalyptic novel, this epic zombie picture most closely resembles Danny Boyle’s jarring 2002 shocker 28 DAYS LATER. Whereas the earlier film began in the eerily quiet aftermath of an infection that turned the populace of Great Britain into rabid, swarming monsters, screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan, J. Michael Straczynski, and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof waste no time plunging us into the midst of a citywide panic at the onset of what we learn is a global epidemic. Ex-United Nations investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) escapes an overrun Philadelphia with wife Karin (Mireille Enos) and their two daughters thanks to a helicopter extraction care of former boss Thierry (Fana Mokoena). His family’s shelter on an aircraft carrier is conditioned, however, upon Gerry returning to fieldwork to locate the source of the plague and, accompanied by scientist Andrew Fassbach (Elyes Gabel) and a squad of soldiers, to find a cure. Gerry first arrives at a desolate and decimated military base in South Korea, only to find all the infected bodies burned. Former CIA operative (David Morse) suggests they travel to Israel where senior Mossad agent Jurgen Warmbrunn (Ludi Boeken) oversees security for the heavily fortressed country by retaining the undead masses outside its towering walls. There Gerry learns that the best hope for a vaccine may lie at a World Health Organization laboratory in Wales, which leads him onto one of the most harrowing commercial flights committed to film. Director Marc Forster sets a relentless pace, deftly handles both the large- and small-scale action, and elicits a surprisingly grounded performance from Pitt. With their willingness to kill off characters indiscriminately and dispassionately, the filmmakers maintain an air of dread seldom experienced in big studio summer fare. The film’s tense final sequence upends expectations further. Our hero achieves success, such as it is, not through weapons proficiency in an absurd shooting gallery video game, but through courage and willing sacrifice for a greater good – qualities too rarely on view in the movies these days.

STORIES WE TELL (2013)

Sarah Polley (best known for performances in the ebullient GO and the devastating THE SWEET HEREAFTER) has evolved into a filmmaker of exceptional merit. AWAY FROM HER, her sensitive adaptation of Alice Munroe’s short story “The Bear Came Over The Mountain,” earned her an Oscar® nomination, and her tender direction helped earn Julie Christie the same. In her new film the writer/director turns documentarian and aims the camera at her own family (and sometimes herself) to explore through collective memory the life of her vivacious mother, Diane, who died in 1990 when Polley was 11 years old. For this project she enlists father Michael, brothers John and Mark, sisters Susy and Joanna, and several family friends and colleagues, some under mild duress, to tell from beginning to end their story of Diane. With these storytellers’ recollections, Polley combines archival footage, seamless reenactments, and written narration recited by Michael, at times punctuated by her request for a line redo, to create an idiosyncratic and deeply personal story. By definition a documentary is factual and objective, but in practice the documenter’s point-of-view prevents true objectivity. Polley is a shrewd enough filmmaker to use this unconventional approach to underscore the elusiveness of objective fact, and gives each story, even those that seem to contradict, equal credence. In a pivotal sequence she shows the danger of presupposition by revealing how one direct investigation leads to a dead end, while a tangential one bears unexpected fruit. Wryly referring to her interview style as an interrogation, Polley is not afraid to ruffle feathers. But her persistence pays off with funny, bracing candor from many of her subjects, particularly the touching Michael. By and large Polley avoids the precious, a real danger inherent in material this close. Instead she transcends the personal and finds the universal. Her film reminds us that our lives are but stories we construct, through memory and action. In some lives we play major roles; in others mere bit parts. And sometimes we must allow our story to change in order to discover who we truly are.

IRON MAN 3 (2013)

Beginning with 1987’s LETHAL WEAPON Shane Black spent a decade as an overpaid writer of big, smart-ass action movies. But dwindling box office mirrored the diminishing aesthetic returns, and Black vanished until his 2005 directorial debut, the underrated KISS KISS BANG BANG, a crackerjack comic thriller starring Robert Downey, Jr. The latest IRON MAN installment reunites director Black (who co-wrote the script with Drew Pearce) and Downey (as Tony Stark) and retains the prior film’s invigorating fusion of the wiseacre and the world weary, energizing a series in danger of becoming inert. After a fitful flashback to New Year’s Eve 1999 in which we watch pre-Iron Man Stark brush off eager technology maven Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) to spend the evening with pretty geneticist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), we return to present day with Stark attempting to recuperate from the apocalyptic attack on New York City by Loki (see THE AVENGERS). Traumatized and sleepless, he spends his nights tinkering in the lab while beloved but beleaguered Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) runs the business. The stalwart Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), meanwhile, changes his branding from War Machine to the Iron Patriot and becomes part of President Ellis’ (William Sadler) security team. An international terrorist calling himself The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) blows up the Chinese Theatre, which hospitalizes Stark’s right hand man Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and brings the inventor before cameras vowing harsh justice. Before a plan can be set in motion, Maya turns up at Stark’s home warning that Killian, her current employer, is in league with The Mandarin. Then all hell breaks loose. While the busy script keeps the action brisk and dialogue crackling, Black gives Downey and Paltrow room to hint at the deep feelings just beneath Stark and Pepper’s glib surface banter. This grounds the outlandish action and keeps human stakes high amidst the CG carnage. In the last decade Black and Downey, former poster boys of vapid excess, have seasoned with age, proving that you can be a grown up and still play with toys.

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (2013)

The best STAR TREK films attain a careful balance between reverence to the source material and the sly upturning of expectations. In the 2009 prequel, director J.J. Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman violated the space/time continuum to give Leonard Nimoy (the original Spock) a cameo and themselves permission to disregard any inconsistency within the established Star Trek universe they may create in future films. The movie was enjoyable enough, with sharp casting and strong character rapport, to overlook this breach. Now Abrams and the writers (with the addition of Damon Lindelof) return to the wormhole in this slapdash sequel, and proceed to unravel the fabric of the franchise with careless abandon. After a busy prologue in which Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) race from indigenous space savages and rescue Spock (Zachary Quinto) from an active volcano where he attempts to set off a cold fusion bomb (to save said savages), we return to Starfleet where Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) reprimands and demotes Kirk for violating the prime directive. However, the demotion is short-lived after an attack on Starfleet command forces Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to send Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise to an isolated planet in Klingon territory, where the attack’s mastermind, Kirk’s future nemesis Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch), has taken refuge. Despite some genuinely harrowing scenes and a handful of engaging character moments -- most involving Quinto, Simon Pegg (as Chief Engineer Scott) and the underused Urban -- the script feels like roughly patched together scenes from better films. Perhaps the puzzling title refers to the willful blindness to which fans of the TV and film series must succumb in order to overlook the gaps in narrative logic through which a fleet of starships could pass. But the filmmakers’ ill-conceived emphasis on confused plotting is merely their second greatest sin. The film’s dramatic centerpiece is ripped whole cloth from 1982’s THE WRATH OF KHAN. This shameless, cynical piece of pilfering is lazy, inexcusable, and unforgiveable.

FRANCES HA (2013)

Films rarely address the awkward transition from feckless youth to dutiful adult in a way that actual grownups might recognize. Too often we spend 90 minutes in the tiresome company of a man-child whose Peter Pan syndrome finally beats us and his screen peers into weary submission. However, this wry, off-kilter comedy does a gender switch, and the whimsical results are discerning, sometimes melancholy, and always humane. 27-year-old Frances (Greta Gerwig) lives the life of a bohemian, barely making ends meet as a student teacher and apprentice at a New York dance studio. She refuses her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s offer to move in, because she prefers to continue living with current roommate and best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Until now she has blithely deferred adult responsibilities and relationships and has come to rely on her friend’s comforting, stable presence. She often says of Sophie, “We’re the same person.” After Sophie announces her plan to move out and spend more time with boyfriend Patch (Patrick Heusinger), Frances’ carefree life begins to unspool. Noah Baumbach & Gerwig’s script feels daft and unruly, not unlike Frances herself. Director Baumbach matches this tone with a loose, irreverent shooting style reminiscent of the French New Wave films of the 1960s, nicely evoked by Sam Levy’s unfussy black and white cinematography. As the unmoored Frances bounces from the couch of rakish Lev (Adam Driver) and adoring Benji (Michael Zegen) to her parents’ (played by Gerwig’s mother and father) home in California to dance colleague Rachel’s (Grace Gummer) apartment to a weekend in Paris to a summer job at her rustic alma mater, she begins to confront the compromises of adulthood. Gerwig’s canny performance keeps us on Frances’ side even as we long to shake some sense into her, and Sumner’s grounded Sophie makes the perfect foil for flighty Frances. We recognize the perfection of their match and feel their growing pains as the friendship necessarily evolves. The witty final shot is both button and grace note that clarifies the film’s enigmatic title.

ROOM 237 (2013)

In 1980 Stanley Kubrick released his film adaptation of Stephen King’s popular horror novel THE SHINING to mostly tepid reviews. The basic premise of the book and film is that a blocked writer, hired as caretaker for an empty, isolated Colorado resort during the winter, becomes possessed by the malevolent spirit of the Overlook Hotel and tries to kill his wife and young son. Initially many fans of the book, myself included, felt that Kubrick’s slow, sterilized approach to the pulpy material missed the forest for the trees – or the hedge animals for the maze. We had hoped Kubrick would make Stephen King’s book. Instead he made a Stanley Kubrick film. During the intervening years, however, the movie worked its way into the subconscious of film culture and began inciting passionate discussions about Kubrick’s true intent, since he clearly failed to make a traditional horror movie. In this enjoyable if somewhat repetitive documentary, director Rodney Ascher gives several SHINING obsessives the chance to expound upon their respective theories, which run the gamut from cogent but unlikely to cheerfully goofy. The most plausible contends that the film depicts the Native American genocide by white settlers, using the Overlook’s preponderance of Southwestern décor, the wash of blood from the elevators, and the ubiquitous horror trope “built on Indian burial grounds” as its basis. The next believes Kubrick was making reference to the Holocaust, with the writer’s German-made typewriter and the repetition of the number “42” (the Nazi’s final solution began in 1942) among its offered evidence. Another suggests Kubrick is confessing to his involvement in the “staged” films of the Apollo moon landings, a widely held conspiracy theory of the time. One points out the impossible geography of the hotel, while another runs the film backward and forward at the same time to find hidden meanings. After a recent viewing of THE SHINING, I believe this is Kubrick’s attempt to drive his audience crazy using visual disorientation and invasive sound design. Based on the evidence of this documentary, he just may have succeeded.

SIDE EFFECTS (2013)

Director Steven Soderbergh’s professed final feature film begins as a tacit critique of our over-medicated culture, from pharmaceutical companies saturating the market with psychotropic medications to ethically challenged doctors testing them on patients to compliant consumers turning to chemicals as a first resort. But then Scott Z. Burns’ clever script alters its makeup and transforms into a winding thriller where greed, deceit and betrayal are more lethal than any side effect. Four years earlier Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) had her life and marriage torn apart when, soon after the nuptials, hedge fund manager husband Martin (Channing Tatum) earns a prison term for insider trading. Shunted from her upstate mansion to a Manhattan apartment, Emily works and waits for Martin’s return. When that day arrives she has an emotional breakdown and drives her car into a wall. This suicide attempt leads her into the care of Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a psychiatrist with a growing practice and lucrative, well-funded drug studies on the side. After several prescriptions fail to help, Banks consults with Emily’s former upstate analyst Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who suggests he try the antidepressant Ablixa. The new drug works wonders on Emily’s mood but causes her to sleepwalk for extended periods. During one such sleepwalking incident Emily commits an act of shocking violence, and someone must pay. Burns and Soderbergh use subtle misdirection and sharp casting to deftly manipulate audience empathy. With a face that invites sympathy while maintaining aloofness Mara makes for a convincing depressive. Likewise Law treads the fine line between sincere concern and suspect opportunism, while Zeta-Jones hints at the repressed urges bubbling under her brittle professional demeanor. Once the story evolves, however, the filmmakers upturn expectations and skillfully navigate each slippery twist to a satisfying, morally ambiguous conclusion. Throughout his career Soderbergh has proven to be an exemplary film craftsman, and here he is at the top of his game. It would be a shame if this truly were his swan song.